Tag Archives: IFA

My article on our broken agricultural system, as it appeared in the Irish Times on April 7th last. Getting a decent splash on the main OpEd page in the Saturday edition (the IT’s most read day of the week by … Continue reading →

Below, my article as it appeared earlier this month on the OpEd page of the Irish Times. I’ve been intrigued for many years at the way some people are automatically pigeon-holed as outliers and ‘radicals’ in certain debates. Nowhere is … Continue reading →

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Ireland’s National Farmers’ Association (NFA) was a political pariah, with then Taoiseach, Fianna Fail’s Jack Lynch threatening to have the organisation proscribed, a move that would have placed every farmer in the … Continue reading →

And so, to Paris. COP21 kicked off on Monday with each of the almost 200 world leaders chipping in their opening contributions. The feeling at the last mega-COP (in Copenhagen in December 2009) was that leaders only engaged at the … Continue reading →

In case you haven’t heard, our current Minister for the Environment is a Labour party TD called Alan Kelly. He is the man who brought us the no-lobbyist-left-behind Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill 2015, a piece of draft … Continue reading →

The shocking images from Japan since Friday are a frightening reminder of the fact that, for all our sophistication, even the most technologically advanced societies exist at the caprice of nature. Seeing large tracts of the north coast of Japan … Continue reading →

Now that the Climate Change Response Bill 2010 has officially been consigned to the scrap heap, it is a good time to take stock of how the public debate around the Bill played out. As has already been discussed on … Continue reading →

The prolific US author, Upton Sinclair was a shrewd observer of human nature, as evidenced in his classic retort to vested interests: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding … Continue reading →

What has meat go to do with climate change? At first glance, not a lot. But dig a little deeper and you’ll soon find that the sharp increases in meat consumption in the last decade or two is a major … Continue reading →